In our modern organizational culture, individuals and the roles they fill are largely fused, and that fusion limits both the people and the organization in many ways. For example, often it is hard to separate emotions about people from emotions about the roles they fill. Sometimes the conflicts we have in organizational life are actually clashes of the roles involved, but we mistake them for clashes between the people filling those roles. Such conflicts become unnecessarily personal, and when we try to resolve them by smoothing over the human relationships, we miss the opportunity to clarify
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